Breast Navigators

Lincoln Surgical is here to support our patients who are diagnosed with breast cancer.

What is your role in the Breast Health Team?

Donna Sommer Johnson, CMA, CN-BC, explains, "I am a certified breast navigator. Patients call with questions about their treatment plan or what's next. I can help them with problems they might have after a surgery, scheduling surgeries or appointments...just keeping them in the right direction. Sometimes it's just a reassurance. They're scared, and I can pretty much talk them through anything. It's very hard because each patient has a different personality, of course, and probably a different diagnosis and prognosis so you just do the best you can with each one and treat each one like a special person."

Kala Edgar, BS, CN-BA, said, "I am actually one of the breast navigators. I'm a breast advocate so I do some of the genetic testing, help to get charts together, and make sure that we have everything that we need for a patient before we see them."

What is something the Breast Navigator certification training helped you better understand?

Donna said, "It teaches you about different patients' environmental situations and what might be harder for them to understand. And it helped me to understand why certain people might have problems with understanding things we're trying to tell them based on upbringing, environmental situation, or maybe the position they are at in life."

What do you enjoy most about working with breast patients?

Kala said she likes relating as a woman to another woman. "Of course, with the breast cancer, you don't know what they're going through necessarily, but it's a lot easier to relate to on a woman basis and with the issues that they are having and kind of just empathize with them a little bit more. I like being there for them," she said. "We're here...whatever they need."